A Friendship PrayerMay you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to travel to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling and forgiveness.
May it change you.
May this transfigure what is negative, distant or cold in you.
May you be introduced to the true passion, kinship and affinity of bonding.
You cherish your friends.
May you be good to them and be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth and light you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always stay in the serene refuge of bonding with your anam cara.(John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, um livro de Sabedoria celta, Ed. Rocco)
Many proverbs and teachings of great sages affirm that the most precious and natural feeling between two people is friendship. If you intend to bring Celtic magic into your life, start valuing your friendships and the people you live with. Learn to be friends with yourself, making room in your soul to relate to other people, to other souls. It is through a friend that we perceive some things, which alone would be impossible to perceive. A true friend does not induce, does not charge. A real friend only wants you well. With a friend we have intimacy, trust and bond. It awakens our own lives, often releasing the power of the creative passion within us. The Celts had a great sensitivity, a very keen sense of the divine. They developed a concept of friendship that involved nature, divinity, occult forces and the human universe in the same plane, in one thing. They did not separate the human from the divine, magic from reality, the visible from the invisible.
The gaelic expression Anam Cara, Friend of the Soul, expresses friendship, understanding, love. "Anam" in Gaelic it means soul and "cara", friend. A teacher, a partner, a partner was considered Anam Cara, a friendship that crossed any boundary, any plan. At first it was a term used for someone to whom intimacy was confessed, because with Anam Cara you could share your own soul. The act of confession has always been very important and personal. In Irish Christianity, the Irish did not confess their “sins” to the local priest, as they believed he could manipulate people because he knew about them. People chose their "priest", the Anam Cara, who was considered a friend in spirit, someone who could be trusted. It is believed that, even before the Church instituted the practice of confession, it was already a Celtic habit to confess to their soul friend, spiritual friend, the Anam Cara. This gesture has always been characteristic among true friends. True friends exchange confessions and from them come words, warmth and important impulse for life. Within Celtic wisdom the soul was not limited by time or space. It was a divine light that flows from one human being to another in a natural way. This concept gave the Celts the idea of fellowship, solidarity, deep and special friendship. when you had a Anam Cara, friendship crossed borders, conventions and time itself. He was united in an eternal way with the friend of his own soul, where a link with the divine was established. In Gaelic the usual “hello”, “hello” or “How are you?” that we use as greetings in meetings, is replaced by words that include the divine, as if they were greetings that bless the approximation between people: Dia Dhuit, “God be with you”. In farewells they said: Go gcoinne Dia thú, “may God keep you”. Every encounter between people was considered special and spiritual, because a stranger does not appear in our lives for nothing or casually. He always brings a message, a lesson, an illumination to our lives. A stranger can be a seed that will germinate bearing fruit, the awakening of life and self-awareness.